Thief 2014 Review

Hello there,I'm Accel and this is my review on Thief 2014.This is a stealth video game developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix.It is a revival of the cult classic Thief series of stealth games, of which it is the fourth game.This game is released across all platform including last-gen consoles on February 2014.

Game link:http://www.thiefgame.com/agegate?locale=us
Steam link:http://store.steampowered.com/app/239160/


Thief, the grandfather of the modern stealth genre and a classic series originally crafted by Looking Glass Studios in 1998 (yes, GR has been around for that long), just might be the most audacious video game for Eidos Montreal to reboot. It carries the lofty weight of expectation from retro gamers and critics who recall the innovation Thief brought to action adventures, as well as the accepted weight of today's triple-A standards in game production and design. Somewhere in its secret hideaway, Eidos Montreal concocted a workable mixture of the two, making compromises where it could and sacrifices where it couldn't. The result should moderately satisfy both old-school and new-school gamers, but suffers from lackluster presentation and several mechanical mishaps.

Thief is a reboot, but it once again puts us in control of the aforementioned Garrett, a master thief who for some inexplicable reason feels the need to steal every little trinket he sees instead of merely focusing on the prize at hand. As you might expect from a game about thievery, it's a stealth game played out from the first-person perspective. You'll take on all manner of jobs around The City—one part medieval-era slum, one part Industrial Revolution-era factory town.

This time you have amnesia, of all things (video game trope #1: check). After a job gone wrong, you awake to find you've forgotten the last year. What were you doing the whole time? Why is the entire city ravaged by a plague known as The Gloom? And who the hell did the people of this city call on to do their interminable, inane fetch quests while you were gone?

As you might suspect, the stealth system focuses on light and shadow as indicated by the ever-present light gem, situated in the bottom-left corner of the screen. It feels strange to have guards walk four feet in front of you and pass you by without making so much as a blink if you're in the dark, but at least it contributes to that "hide in shadows" fantasy. Other times, the point is to avoid eye contact with guards at all costs. Taken together, it's all about shooting torches with water arrows, swooping from shadow to shadow, throwing bottles as distractions, avoiding birds and hounds, dragging bodies into places where the City Watch won't notice, and climbing ropes when they're looking away.

But once started, the story is actually fairly compelling in that summer blockbuster way we've all come to expect from AAA games. It's an amalgam of a bunch of game tropes—for instance, game trope #2: level taking place in a mental institute, and game trope #3: vital information conveyed through notes conveniently scattered around the level—but it's all pieced together with enough intrigue and tragedy that it held my attention through at least the back half of a solid 20+ hour experience.

Thief plays a lot like a Dishonored prototype. Like Dishonored, except you're not quite as agile, and you suck at combat. In other words, like Dishonored before Arkane really figured out what would set Dishonored apart. And, as a result, I spent most of my time with Thief wishing I could just replay Dishonored.

Thief feels torn between tradition and modernity. It wants so badly to feel like original Thief, but it also wants to feel approachable like Dishonored. As a result, it's something of an unholy abomination of the two. Thief even has a pseudo-teleport: An action the game labels "swooping," which allows you to run rapidly across a brightly lit area without being seen, as if the guards are too dumb to see the man clearly sprinting across the light in front of them.

For Thief, slow and steady wins the race, and careful exploration is rewarded with extra collectibles and will have Garrett not be caught off-guard by traps. Most levels, though usually linear as a whole, have one or two paths off the beaten path, like a secret set of stairs inside a greenhouse or a brothel with a boiler room that can be used to knock out all of its inhabitants. Using focus vision for just a brief second helps too, since it reveals important objects in the area just like Detective Mode in the Batman: Arkham series.

Polishing is the most noticeable issue with Thief, particularly the quality of the graphics and audio. Thief isn't the first title to copy and paste character models throughout the world, but sometimes more than several models can be seen populating the same tavern, though with just different outfits. The lip-syncing and the facial animations feel stiff, and the textures don't have the highest resolution. NPC dialogue repeats itself often, sometimes in immediate succession, and its volume tends to be high no matter whether Garrett dashes in a busy street, crouches in a vent, or hides in an enclosed room with shuttered windows that need a crowbar to open. Consequently, the audio can get disorienting.So in the end I would like to give this game a score 7 out of 10.So what do you guys think. Let me know.